Exploring the AIW 9700 Pro's VIVO/PVR capabilities

Kick out the noise, bring in the funkby Geoff Gasior  12:04 AM on January 21, 2003

FOR YEARS, ATI's All-in-Wonder "do anything" graphics cards have been the Swiss Army knives of the graphics card world. If they existed during the mid-80s, MacGuyver would have surely been running one in his PC. Probably with a pretty cool duct tape mod, too. But I digress.

What's the All-in-Wonder all about? Well, it involves two ingredients. The first is a dazzling array of video input and video output ports (VIVO) that enable video capture and output in a number of different standardized formats, and the second is a TV tuner that lets a system act as a personal video recorder (PVR), much like a TiVo. ATI takes a standard graphics card, sprinkles it with VIVO ports and a dash of PVR functionality, and an All-in-Wonder is born. Of course, there's a lot more to the process than that, and we'll be covering it all in explicit detail over the following pages.

We first previewed ATI's All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro back in September of last year, and even then, we were tempted by the prospect of an All-in-Wonder powered by ATI's revolutionary R300 graphics processor. Now that All-in-Wonder 9700 Pros are readily available from a host of retailers, we're taking a closer look at a production sample to see if the finished product lives up to its potential. Does the All-in-Wonder 9700 Pro continue ATI's tradition of producing industry-leading VIVO/PVR-enabled graphics cards, and are those pixel shader-powered video filters really all that? Read on to find out.